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Animal Emotions

Everyone who's ever owned a pet has at least one story (usually many, actually) of an animal that seems just as emotional as any human. Take Ruth Osment, who says her two cats, Penny and Jo, feel sorry for her when she cries--running to her and drying her tears with their fur. Or Donna Westlund, whose roommate's parrot Koko shows all the classic signs of a teenage crush, calling out "Hey, come here," whenever she tries to leave the room. Then there's John Van Zante. Recently, he watched Max, a Labrador retriever mix, sit lovingly by a woman in a wheelchair in a convalescent home while she patted his head for several minutes. It wasn't until the elderly woman wheeled off down the hall that Van Zante realized she had been parked on Max's tail the entire time. Max hadn't complained at all. "He was in pain, clearly, but he seemed to know that she had special needs, so he just sat through it," says Van Zante, communications director for the Helen Woodward Animal Center in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.

Van Zante doesn't understand why some scientists argue that animals have no emotions, that they merely respond to incentives like so many automatons. "If we were purely a source for food, I'm certain that Max's reaction would have been different," he says. "Haven't these scientists noticed that their cats can't wait to rub up against their legs and reclaim ownership of their people after a day at work? Don't they take the time to greet their tail-wagging dogs when they get home?"

Well, yes. But they're not as starry-eyed about what they see. For decades, psychologists have discounted the idea that pets can love their humans back. They have argued that animals that appear to express emotions are merely reacting to hormonal rushes triggered--in cold, but typical, technical language--by "outside stimuli." But that view is changing, thanks to a loosely knit band of researchers working in fields as far-flung as neurobiology and behavioral observation. With new evidence gleaned from studies of dogs, chimps and sundry other creatures, science is starting to catch up to what pet owners have always suspected: animals experience surges of deep-seated fear, jealousy and grief--and, most important, love. Unlike the few researchers who came before them, the scientists leading the new movement actually have solid evidence. "Five years ago my colleagues would have thought I was off my rocker," says biologist Marc Bekoff. "But now scientists are finally starting to talk about animal emotions in public. It's like they're coming out of the closet."

And at an apt time, too--more and more pet owners now depend on their furry and feathered friends for emotional support. "People are delaying having children, but they still need that connection, that love," says Tamar Geller, owner of The Loved Dog Co. in Los Angeles. For many in that crowd, she says, pets are serving as surrogate kids. That may explain the sudden surge in interest; the push to find out what pets and other animals are thinking is being driven largely by those who love them. After all, if you're going to devote years of affection to an animal, isn't it nice to think it's not unrequited?

Aside from Charles Darwin, most students of animal behavior in the past believed that animals didn't have emotions--or that if they did, we'd never know. Over the years, the belief hardened into dogma. Then, in the mid-'60s, came Jane Goodall. Since she had little scientific training, she had never been indoctrinated with behaviorist theory. "But I'd had this amazing teacher my whole life," she says. That would be Rusty, a little black mongrel who lived at a hotel in her childhood neighborhood. "He went everywhere with me, and he didn't even belong to me," she says. "At the hotel he was disobedient, but he was beautifully behaved and sensitive with me. Of course, I thought animals had emotions, personalities, minds. How could I not?" Goodall un--knowingly rebelled against standard scientific practices in the wilds of Africa, giving her chimps names instead of impersonal numbers and describing their behavior with words like "joy," "depression" and "grief." The dons at Cambridge University rolled their eyes, but her studies were ultimately irrefutable. They might never have happened, Goodall notes, if she hadn't preferred Rusty to "the scientific treadmill."

Today, thanks to those studies, the treadmill is a rather different exercise. Researchers carrying on Goodall's legacy are finding that it extends far beyond chimps, to dogs, cats, birds, rats and even animals as "simple" as the lowly octopus. All of them experience fear--the most ancient of the emotions, mediated by the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ in the brain. Many animals may feel something akin to love as well. Chimpanzees sometimes adopt baby chimps unrelated to them; horses have been known to form bonds so intense they refuse to spend the night in different stalls; whales have been spotted (albeit rarely) performing a peculiar dance that may be the equivalent of a human's postcoital cuddling.

Not surprisingly, the animal that has shown researchers the most emotional complexity thus far is the dog. Bred as human companions for thousands of years, dogs have evolved into master communicators. Recent studies show they are even better than chimpanzees at reading human emotional cues, a trait that undoubtedly helped them in the quest for food and shelter in the caves of early man. They may be equally adept at expressing their own feelings and personalities. Samuel Gosling, a biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, says people can reliably "type" four dimensions of canine personality: sociability, affection, emotional stability and "competence," which combines obedience and intelligence. They're remarkably similar to the four basic categories of human personality found in standard psychological tests.

The increased use of psychoactive pet drugs like Prozac (sold in its dog form as Clomicalm) is another piece of evidence. If animals didn't have moods mediated by the same neurotransmitters as humans, why would they react to our mood lifters? The trend toward pet psychiatry even extends to seemingly effective alternative treatments like hydrotherapy and acupuncture. And last month New York saw its first "doga" class in Madison Square Park. Yes, it's what you think. Two books, "Doga: Yoga for Dogs" and "Yoga for Pets and the People Who Love Them," will be published this fall.

The evidence for pet mood modifiers may be firm. But yoga? It relaxes people, but that alone is little reason to think it would relax dogs. (The concept doesn't work the other way: would you enjoy an afternoon of catching Frisbees in your mouth?) Here's where the one real problem with the research pops up: enthusiasts, particularly laypeople, tend to go overboard. "There's still a lot of fluff out there, especially in terms of dog and cat behavior," says Harvard biologist Marc Hauser. Comparing human emotions to animals' may be like comparing color vision to black-and-white--they're the same concept, but the former is immensely more complex. Even Bekoff, who lays out the case for emotion in his recent "Minding Animals," isn't "claiming that dog joy and --human joy are the same thing." And as for love, pets adore their owners, to be sure--but not in the way that we love our own families. "They are scholars of the people they live with," says Jon Katz, author of the just-released "The New Work of Dogs." "What drives them to be affectionate is pretty primitive: food, shelter, attachment. They're not thinking, 'This guy's an interesting fellow, I'm going to be his friend'."

When pet lovers like Karla Swatek joke that animals are "far more human than some humans I know," Katz starts to get worried. As for the millions of people who are convinced that their pets are psychic--like Lisa Burgess of Escondido, Calif., who swears her Chihuahua, Diego, persuaded her to postpone a trip that would have coincided with her mother's otherwise unforeseen emergency bladder surgery--well, you can guess what Katz thinks of them. "Why do we have to make our animals into mystics?" he says. "Why can't they just be great animals?" Even Geller, the dog trainer, agrees. "I'm glad science is finally starting to realize that animals have real emotions--it makes my work so much easier," she says. "But we can't just treat them like humans."

Animal psychology is still an emerging field, a home for zany ideas that will be whittled down later into more realistic theories. Neurobiology in particular needs more fine-tuning. Animals may have many of the same brain structures as humans, but in several cases, when animal behavior mimics that of humans, the underlying neural processes differ. Scientists might be able to distinguish between the two with active brain scans, but current neurobiological research on animals involves "mucking around in their brains," says Bekoff, in which case you're "not dealing with a normal animal." The noninvasive brain-scanning techniques that revolutionized the study of human behavior in the '90s haven't helped, either--despite their name, PET scans aren't appropriate for conscious animals that would panic if put into a claustrophobia-inducing chamber. Behavioral studies, too, are still limited, if only by time and money. And, of course, there are still scientists who refuse to accept the idea of any animal emotion at all, save fear. "I'm sure there's still a bunch of old curmudgeons thinking that everything is stimulus and response," says Lisa Parr, who studies chimpanzee empathy at Emory.

But, Parr adds, most of her colleagues think the rise of animal-emotion studies is "fantastic and long overdue." And it may proceed faster than the "curmudgeons" think. Technology will play a role--brain-scanning helmets that strap on to animals' heads may be available in just a few years. And, of course, unlike human subjects, animals can be cloned. "We can bring them up in different environments," says Gosling, rhapsodizing about future projects modeled on human identical-twin studies. Soon, he says, we'll have answers to questions that animal lovers have been asking for years. And we'll have some newer questions, too: is it fair to keep emotional beings cooped up in kennels, cages and small backyards? If rats and rabbits feel, how can we justify experimenting on them? Research on farm animals is just starting--what will it mean for our eating habits? And can our pets really love us back? The last of those, at least, is already solved. The answer, no matter whom you ask, is yes.